Dally wrote:
I asked my questions first. I have also done so above.
And I have explained to you, in the simplest terms that I could manage, that the wider the income gap, the more the cost to the state in terms of lower social outcomes.
Dally wrote:
What do you think will happen if that state of affairs is not addressed?
As has been pointed out, you're quite clearly confused about matters such as GDP etc.
And are you really suggesting that, for instance, the UK should increase aid so as 'level the playing field', as you seem to see it?
Or what? We stop, for instance, selling lots of financial services and let the Chinese or the Indians do it instead?
Or are you seriously suggesting that we cut healthcare and education etc?
What you refuse utterly to deal with in all this is the actual, real-time consequences.
Do you imagine it would suddenly be nice and cheap if people just happen to be bounced out of their homes on to the street because they don't earn enough to keep a roof over their heads and government decides it'll do away with housing benefits? Or if we'd just butcher education and health spending, even though we'd then be consequently less productive?
Perhaps we should cut pensions? Maybe just send the retired off into the wilderness to die and stop eating up valuable resources?
I repeat, because I have been asking this for weeks if not months, and you're just one of many who ignores it: the evidence shows that the wider the income gap, the poorer the social outcomes for ALL of a society. And those poorer social outcomes come at a financial cost too.
Next, for someone who has posted many times on this forum about the need for people (well, not himself, obviously) to become religious again in order to make them behave better, you could do with showing some sense of morals/ethics yourself.
At present, your entire line seems to be that if Big Business and Big Finance tell you something, you swallow it hook line and sinker, and are then entirely happy for your fellow citizens to suffer,.
You never have a single concrete answer to that suffering; ever, or to how far you think people who blameless for the financial crisis can be pushed and what will happen if they keep on being pushed.
Dally wrote:
Do you think it's fair that we have so much of the cake when others have so little?
The bulk of the global 'cake', if you insist on such an analogy, is held by a very, very small percentage of the population/companies/banks: and the ordinary working people of this country are not included any more than the ordinary working people of any other countries are included.
Merkel is a conservative who will never easily admit that the major problem is the power of transnational and multination corporates, and the era's dominant political-economic ideology that has worked to put an ever-increasing share of that bleedin' cake into the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Different shares of the cake? Happily. Let's sort out big business and big finance then, which is ripping off people around the world and then playing them off against each other.
Dally wrote:
Do you really think that the global cake will expand to c.7 times its current level in the short-term so that we can justify that level of spending based on your concept of what's fair?
See your previous question and my previous answer. It wouldn't need to if big business and big finance behaved with human decency at their core, and if sustainability and the long-term were considered as opposed to short-term profit that puts human beings as the least important part of the equation.
